Hemingway, Ernest

The Fifth Column. A Play in Three Acts. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940

8vo. Publisher's grey cloth stamped in red; top and bottom edges damp stained. Original dust-jacket; very  minor light edgewear. In a quarter-morocco slipcase.

Hanneman A17 

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A presentation copy of the first edition thus, inscribed to his mother-in-law on the front endpaper: "To Mother with much love / Ernest / San Francisco de Paula / Cuba." The “mother” in question is the mother of his third wife, Martha Gellhorn. Though Hemingway did not date this inscription—an unfortunate habit of his—this presentation was likely made in 1940 upon his marriage to Martha, with whom he made his home in the Cuban village near Havana. His inscription to Martha in her copy of the 1938 edition of The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories reads, similarly, “This is a book that I will write in for you later. /  Souvenir of San Francisco / de Paula / Ernest.”

After finishing The Fifth Column, Hemingway repeatedly expressed doubts that it would ever see production. He wrote to his first wife, Hadley, with whom he had remained on good terms, from Madrid: “I don’t really give a good goddamn about that...” (Selected Letters p. 463), ascribing his misgivings to “too much money trouble.” After undergoing the trials of actual production and severe rewriting, he told his mother-in-law (the mother of his second wife, Pauline): “I wish I had never heard of a play but had written a novel instead. Probably a lot of other people do too.” Calling the experience an  “Old Testament nightmare,” he related: “...[The producers] had opened the play with the high spots of the third act and had thus made quite an exciting first act but of course had nowhere to go after that and so I had to write two absolutely new acts. It should be called the 4.95 Column marked down from 5 now...” On a lighter note, he added: “This morning I woke up dreaming that they had obtained new backing from a Vermouth Company and that the play was now to be called Cinzano Express. The first four scenes were to be the same but we should re-write the next to get the proper vermouth angle in. This was a real dream...” (ibid pp. 475-76).

The scarcest trade edition in Hemingway’s canon. This is the only known presentation copy.